Wouldn't a 2gb HDD be more than what was the norm during the 486DX4 time period? I'd expect something between 500mb and 1.2gb.

I think it's well spec'd out. I've got a 1GB spinning drive in my DX2/66, but BIOS only sees 504MB 😉 So I'm glad your BIOS allows full use of the 2GB. How does Quake play? I'm assuming you need to play in 320x200 to have any shot at double-digit framerates?

harddrivespin wrote:

Wouldn't a 2gb HDD be more than what was the norm during the 486DX4 time period? I'd expect something between 500mb and 1.2gb.

Depends on your time period and how strictly accurate you want to be. In 1994 a 540mb IDE drive was pretty much the norm in an expensive 486DX4 build. 214mb low end and 1GB all the way up top in early Pentiums. 2GB drives came into their own in high end consumer rigs in 1996

So a 540MB drive would be my vote for "best drive you would have gotten with a just launched DX4" but I wouldn't call a 2GB too out of whack though. I use a 1.8GB Western Digital drive dated mid 1996 in mine and don't really think it ruins the time period aesthetic of the system, since DX4 systems were still common in households and most of us upgraded to bigger drives anyway.

Relax, people, everything is relative. 😀
For example, in '99 I still had got my 286-12 with SCSI CD-ROM, 16-Bit stereo sound, VGA and a 80MB HDD (40MB usable),
while my father had got a 386 with two "huge" drives (120MB+240MB ?), a fAX modem and a streamer.
And we were going online with WinCIM, do e-banking, home work, etc.
486es were in use about as long as Win9x mattered (up to ~2006 when it reached EOL)
and thus got upgraded several times.. So all in all, we should keep in mind that even then real world usage
wasn't always the same as the official specs on paper. 😉

harddrivespin wrote:

Wouldn't a 2gb HDD be more than what was the norm during the 486DX4 time period? I'd expect something between 500mb and 1.2gb.

well i guess it is out of the norm, but it was the smaller SD Card that i had and i didn't even bother to try to find a smaller one because well, the bios supported the size and that was the limit for fat16 partition.
For the drives you can see that i didn't followed the period correct(like the 48x cd-rw drive, and the sd card).

clueless1 wrote:

I think it's well spec'd out. I've got a 1GB spinning drive in my DX2/66, but BIOS only sees 504MB 😉 So I'm glad your BIOS allows full use of the 2GB. How does Quake play? I'm assuming you need to play in 320x200 to have any shot at double-digit framerates?

It runs actually pretty good(considering that is running on a 486 class machine), with the small screen is kind of playable for me,it is running on 320x200 and i had to resize the screen to get a better frame rate, i don't know if you have seen the build video but i show the quake running.

I may add some more pictures of the actual front of the case with the mod, it is not a real beauty, but the convenience for file transfer that i obtained mounting it to the front(on a empty 5.25 drive bay) is amazing.
and i'm currently working on a DIY Virtual Modem(its like a Wifi232).

clueless1 wrote:

I think it's well spec'd out. I've got a 1GB spinning drive in my DX2/66, but BIOS only sees 504MB 😉 So I'm glad your BIOS allows full use of the 2GB. How does Quake play? I'm assuming you need to play in 320x200 to have any shot at double-digit framerates?

What kind of BIOS? I've got AMIBIOS ( 40-PD07-001169-00101111-072594-SIS471G-H ) - the one you can use a mouse in, and it allows 2 gig.Great compatibility with CF cards.

Nice build BTW - Bit of a modern CRT there 😉

Ah, the PCChips M912 v1.7 motherboard. That was my childhood to adulthood board (1994-2012) until the BIOS chip gave out.

I might as well get 2 desktop tower cases for both my Socket 7 system and my AM3+ system and put them on a table with the KVS switch boxes for the Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus and the K6-2/300 system.